The following memo to Jacob Schlesinger,
relative to his piece in The Wall Street Journal, originally
ran on our website January 2, 1997. It listed the “Ten Most Evil Men in
the World.” It is time for an update and we request website fans to submit
nominations. We then will revise our list and post it for you next week.

Should American taxpayers ante up another
zillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund to help it bail out the
next Mexico? Your answer seems to be an emphatic yes, based on your exhaustive
reporting on the matter, (12/31/96 WSJ, p. 4, “IMF Drafts
Plan to Avert Another Mexico”). I note you quote only three sources: Deputy
Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, IMF Chief Economist Stanley Fischer,
and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs. If your exhaustive reporting had led you
to dig even a fraction of an inch below the surface, Mr. Schlesinger, you
would have found that these three chalk-stained, Ivy League professors have
been working as a team for the last several years, doing their best to destroy
economic growth whenever it rears its ugly head. Two have incredibly powerful
public positions for which they are totally unfit, having lived their entire
lives on academic or government payrolls. The third, Mr. Sachs, is a close
buddy, whose job it is to stand outside the IMF and accuse it of being
mediocre, at times incompetent, because it does not have enough U.S. taxpayer
funds to hire more of his friends. “Give my pals Larry Summers and Stan
Fischer another $30 billion or so, and they will show you a thing or two,” he
has come close to saying on many occasions. The “shock therapy” that was
designed by Jeffrey Sachs for Moscow’s conversion to capitalism was fully
backed by Fischer and Summers, who at the time was chief economist of the
World Bank.

If you would leaf back into the files of
Dow Jones, you will find the fingerprints of Stan Fischer and Larry Summers on
the Mexican peso debacle. These were the whizkids north of the border who
engineered the peso devaluation, as soon as it was possible following the
departure of Finance Minister Pedro Aspe, who had fought this evil crowd
almost every day of his six years at Hacienda. The IMF would not have
needed a nickel to mop up the giant mess these evil nitwits caused, for fun
and profit, thinking they could get away with an itsy-bitsy devaluation which
instead turned into a crash. The IMF/World Bank represents an Evil Empire,
which does the bidding of the international bankers who earn interesting
pocket money by having the inside scoop on every IMF-induced devaluation on
earth. Haven’t you heard?

For your Rolodex, Mr. Schlesinger, I will
list for you the Ten Most Evil Men in the World. This is based on our
scholarly analysis and exhaustive reporting on the ten whose public works or
private agitations have caused more people to have suffered needlessly in
recent years than any others. In order of evil:

3) Rudiger Dornbusch, professor of
economics, MIT, who constantly roams the world urging unsuspecting governments
to devalue their currencies and raise taxes.

4) Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard
economist and henchman who espoused burning down entire economies that don’t
work in the belief that good ones will soon emerge, “shock
therapy.”

5) Lawrence Summers, Deputy Treasury
Secretary.

6) Paul Krugman, MIT economist now at
Stanford, chief economist of the Microsoft Slate, who roams the world warning
unsuspecting governments of emerging markets to discourage foreign equity
investments, or else what happened to Mexico will happen to them.

7) Fred Bergsten, director, Institute for
International Economics, Wash. DC. Bergsten holds the world’s record for
talking governments into devaluing their currencies for fun and profit,
including the United States in 1971. The term manic devaluationist was coined
especially to fit Fred. A charter member of the Evil Empire.

8) Jacques DeLors, director of the
European Community Commission, the evil twin brother of Michel Camdessus,
separated at birth, whose life goal is to hammer everyone on earth down to the
lowest common denominator.

9) James Tobin, professor of economics,
Yale University, the grand daddy of the devaluationists, whose work spawned an
entire generation of neo-Keynesian globetrotters. Evil Emeritus.

10) Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq.

By the way, Saddam Hussein barely made the evil list.
We’re more sure of the first nine, even though their intentions may have been
motivated less by evil than his. We tend to give Saddam the benefit of the
doubt more than we do Michel Camdessus. The road to hell is paved with good
intentions, by professionals who think they know everything and thus can avoid
dealing with their critics. This goes for journalists as well as Bigdome
Macroeconomists.